DIRTY NETS. To 8 April.
North
DIRTY NETS
by Karen Laws
Live Theatre To 8 April 2004
Tue-Thu 8pm
BSL Signed 6 April
Runs 1hr 20min No interval
TICKETS: 0191 232 1232
www.live.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 4 April
Toughg on eye and ear, but with a comic edge and eventual dramatic development.
Byker-bred writer Karen Laws has already won one comedy-writing prize and is working on a TV sitcom. If it turns out anything like this theatre script, then wait for the merde to hit the Lady Windermere on its screening.
One of the three characters is allegedly covered in the brown stuff (thankfully, theatre technology is more restrained with its olfactory assaults than with the shrieks and gore). He's old Barney, living behind the dirty net-curtains in a roomful of squalour to match. And though Mazza's the brighter of the two young men who burgle Barney's, it's he who chooses that place rather than one of the cleaner residences.
Lawes establishes the burglars' credentials in a front-of-curtain (rare, here) scene at the start. Mazza, it emerges, has already done a stretch inside, and could have prevented Sam - apparently, as we're reminded with a repetition that stretches the funny to the incredible, a simple-minded soul - having to resort to the local usurer-thug to borrow money for a nice wedding so he can settle down to an orderly life.
There follows a catalogue of ineptitudes, and repeated has he/hasn't he plot twitches as to whether Barney's an old man with money stashed somewhere on the premises, or merely an old man living alone, fending off social services.
There are plenty of good lines, and Laws late on provides a not-too-unexpected development about the place's contents. More interestingly, she shifts the perspective on the younger men's relationship, showing new sides to both of them. This serves to place Rob Atkinson's Sam as more than an unthinking lump, making his wearisomely predictable wrong-moves part of a fuller canvas - it's a transition Atkinson prepares and manages with skill and apparent ease.
Joe Caffrey's already shown his Live comic skill in the theatre's recent Alan Plater play; he's just as good here - better, if anything, as his role is further to the fore. The frustration and impatience (which anyone teamed with Sam might feel), even his form in jail, take on a new, richer aspect.
Colin MacLachlan has less of a character development to handle, but he manages grime, grizzle and cunning well. The piece, though, is relentless and as monotone as Imogen Cloet's apt design and Malcolm Rippeth's lighting.
With a downbeat foetid quality that's sometimes restricting and language which is not so much wrong-side of watershed as deep in the sewage farm, it's grim comedy from up North, but skilled enough to show a writer who could be capable of uniting the complexity of good drama with the performance-aware wit of good comedy.
Sam: Rob Atkinson
Mazza: Joe Caffrey
Barney: Colin MacLachlan
Director: Jeremy Herrin
Designer: Imogen Cloet
Lighting: Malcolm Rippeth
Fight director: Renny Krupinski
2004-04-06 13:05:46